May the Fruit be with you, and other social networking ideas

Social networking (and the clunky-sounding Web 2.0 catchall) is proving to be a tough nut to crack for marketers. The medium, if you can call it that yet, is all about people expressing themselves and the lifespan of information and its relevance in this world is unbelievably short lived. Using social networks for marketing experiments could be extremely rewarding, a disaster, or worse - a non event. Some interesting stories doing the rounds are a story of Moonfruit (a hosting service that has a free website creation tool) and Starbucks latest launch of Starbucks icecream through Facebook. Moonfruit & Twitter Moonfruit have been doing some good marketing. One of their latest ideas, and certainly the one with most widespread popularity, was to run a competition on micro-blogging site Twitter. Macbooks were up for the winning for the creative use of their brand name in Tweets. It worked like wildfire (and seemingly from Twitter's perspective, was put out like one too). What a wonderful exercise to take some brilliant learnings from. You don't need to be big and powerful to make an impact in your target audience with social media. You need an inspired idea, a very good understanding of the social media platform, and you must be able to manage what happens next. You don't even need a big budget. But you don't even qualify if you don't understand your target audience. Moonfruit had a wonderful experience, gained massive awareness, and their target market (and more besides) took hold of their brand and made it their own. Their statement on their blog (subsequent to disappearing off the Twitter trending scales) was: "But given how it has turned out we are also touched by how people have responded to the brand and campaign. We love how they’ve questioned it, played with it, joked about it, sung about it, painted it, made it out of fruit, shouted at it and made it what it is through their participation. We are in awe of the brilliance and creativity of the Twittersphere. So thank you all." http://www.moonfruitlounge.com/. Starbucks and Facebook Starbucks took a more conventional approach in creating a viral wave offering coupons for their new Starbucks icecream through Facebook. Even though this is a US based example, there is no reason why this wouldn't work anywhere, and I'd be blown away if UK based Starbucks fans didn't now know all about it too. Their international site describes the promotion for Starbucks® Ice Cream here. The Facebook page for Starbucks has 3,446,409 fans listed. That is an enormous group of people who have identified themselves as being committed customers, implying their brand loyalty. A ready-made audience to effect a launch of any new idea, assuming they log in to Facebook to see it. All you need is a little of the 'forward to a friend' magic and you suddenly open up untapped parts of your market. WARC says in their article 'Brands making inroads on social nets' that 'more than half of US consumers who regularly use social networking sites have signed up to become "friends" with a brand. What an opportunity. Thinking about how best to use social media for your marketing? These platforms demand that you have a very good understanding of your target market, or are intent on learning about them from your actions. What is your customer's motivations for using these social networks? In some cases they will belong to multiple networks to express the different aspects of who they are. Often their on screen persona is just that, and can even be different between sites. What is very clear is that it is all about participation. If no one passes on your viral idea, it just isn't viral. If you get no comments on your business' Facebook page, what is it really doing for you? It clearly isn't doing anything for your potential customers. Social networking isn't just any bandwagon. You need to have a strategy. And a clear idea of what your target audience could get out of the interaction with you. If you can't offer something that is truly an extension to your brand or business, that gives value, then why are you doing it? If you aren't in touch with your customers now, then crossing the divide with social networking may leave you pretty exposed. Start smaller if you must. Why not find a way to learn from your customers and give a new way to enjoy your business? Be a little lateral. Try this for an example: If you are a builder, maybe you need to be Facebooking about design trends and economical ideas about rebuilding houses. Or tap into the resources in the local community and do a joint page for potential customers in your local area of work that need you and others of your ilk - you know, the plasterer, the plumber etc. Offer value. Some points to consider that have been raised by the community analysing social networking trends: - Which brands aren't using social media says as much as those that do. - Its not often about the quality, but the readership. - The more awareness, the more success, the more precarious being at the top can be. - What's popular is rarely what's good. Apply it to your business: * Social network media are a big wake up call to do more to understand your customer, so that you can have an interactive relationship with them. If you aren't ready to market using these media, you sure can learn more about your customers in terms of their use of them. Which will help you with the marketing you do. * At a very basic level offering a basic means of sharing feedback is a dialogue starter. Social media may or may not be the ticket for you, but you can reach out to your customer and ask them what they think about you and your products, and if you are very lucky, they will tell you. Be prepared to DO something with what you learn. * What do people do with your what you sell? Besides buy them. Use that knowledge to help you find your customers, and if you don't know, find out. Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper Practical Marketing.